Grasset enforced his own interpretation of hysteria without examining any of the rooms for alternative explanations. Jeanne’s crisis, which lasted several hours and repeated every evening, encouraged her parents to hospitalize her again on 20 February 1902. This time, it was at St Eloi Hospital in Montpellier, in the Department of Medical Clinic of Drs Calmette and Grasset. The story stops here as Grasset wrote that there have been no more extraordinary phenomena in the house in the absence of Jeanne. He subsequently produced a medical description attesting Jeanne’s hysteria, verified by her variable and transient anaesthesia and other phenomena:27
Big three hysterical crisis occurred in the service, small crises of ball with convulsive movements, conjunctival and pharyngeal anesthesia, bilateral ovarie with feeling of strangulation when pressing, variable and transient anesthesia with possible use of uncollected sensations (with the left hand anesthetized, she appreciates the shape of objects and recognize them), allochiria, tunnel vision with color blindness, dermographism.28
This vocabulary has the effect of reducing the unexplained phenomena that occurred around Jeanne to a mere medical case, thereby restoring ‘normality’. Added to the observations made at the hospital, Jeanne is further described as stealing objects, confabulating stories and simulating raps. Grasset extrapolated these two orders of facts: ‘The obvious first impression is that there are a mixture of juggling or hoax, of hysteria or neurosis, and, finally, or gullibility or stupidity.’29 He followed to the letter Janet, who, in his medical thesis,30 concluded that ‘most of the mediums, if not all, have nervous phenomena and are neurotic when they are not downright hysterical’.31 Grasset determined that Family A wanted to scare away buyers of the house, thus giving an explanation about this gigantic fraudulent operation. Bad handling of the situation made the phenomenon elusive, which is seen when it occurred less when controls were more strictly enforced. As such, Grasset’s theory was justified when it was concluded that systematic cheating produced this ‘haunted house’; and he designated Jeanne as mainly responsible for that, completely missing the analysis of the family dynamics:
Jeanne is the lead actress: this is certain. First, she has a detestable character, and we have seen the phenomena reappear in hospital: small knocks, wallet stolen […] But here it did not last long and we made her confess juggling.32
Grasset can be seen to have made biased assumptions and neglected more detailed and nuanced explanations. According to him, the possibility of being able to produce phenomena fraudulently was sufficient to explain all of what occurred at the house, though occultists Gaston Méry and Papus would later question the validity of this reasoning.33
However, Grasset defended the scientific focus of his observations by saying that Jeanne’s hysteria was not feigned and that the fraud was involuntary and, therefore, unconscious. He relied on an article by Ochorowicz34 that proposed the same interpretation of some recurrent frauds by the medium Eusapia Palladino.35 More importantly, the assumption of unconscious fraud is an additional demonstration of the reality of the subconscious psychism. Grasset was above all the theorist of a double psychism model involving a polygon with a higher centre (consciousness) and lower centres explaining automatisms, unconscious acts, hallucinations and so on. Every time Jeanne was likely to have produced the phenomenon, Grasset stated with aplomb that although she did it, she did so unconsciously. Then, he summarized the history of spiritualism established by Janet to generalize his findings. In his view mediums are largely irresponsible people that need to be cured and whose seemingly intelligent actions are not consciously done. As such, they are not horrors, but act in a state of ‘automatism’. One sees here how studies of mediums were of great importance for the development of dynamic psychiatry.36 In contrast, parapsychologists and spiritualists were fighting for the recognition of these abnormalities in young mediums as giving credence to the reality of their powers. They fought for the reconsideration of a residue of phenomena that did not fall into the category of proven frauds. Notwithstanding, in 1903, Xavier Dariex reproduced Grasset’s analysis of this case in the Annales des sciences psychiques, the major French journal devoted to psychical research at that time. Parapsychologists in the nineteenth century appreciated this tenuous link between adolescence and haunting, which subsequently opened a real avenue of research. They postulated that such extraordinary phenomena may, in fact, be the product of an extraordinary energy, which is concentrated and suddenly released, during the ‘crisis of adolescence’.
4. Parapsychology and the Teenager as a Focus Person for Recurrent Spontaneous Psycho-Kinesis
The merge between ‘adolescent crisis’ and ‘poltergeist’ in the nineteenth century was built on many ambiguities: it grouped together ideas around the adolescent as a hoaxer, the general abnormalities of adolescence and any ‘supernormal’ abilities that may accompany them. So much so that, for decades, researchers would strive to conduct batteries of psychological tests on young subjects caught up in tumultuous events. There is a wealth of data on such cases though, unsurprisingly, much of it is contradictory (as summarized by Catala37). The parapsychologist William G. Roll, who coined the term ‘recurrent spontaneous psycho-kinesis’ (RSPK), was able to detect repressed aggressiveness, hostility against the father, a hidden hostility against the mother, anger, guilt, a sense of injustice, dependency, emotional immaturity, dissatisfaction, insecurity and so on. German studies noticed an unstable personality, irritability, emotional immaturity, low frustration tolerance, uncontrolled impulses, conflicts in the areas of social esteem and sexuality, a move in aggression on other targets, covering conflicts and so on.38 In short, and in the words of the German parapsychologist Hans Bender, as the dream is for Freud, so the poltergeist is ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ for parapsychologists. The unfortunate consequence of all this confusing and obfuscating data is that parapsychologists have lost sight of the individual and the traumatic cases of personal psychological conflict involved.
Many had tried to define a particular syndrome: for example, the parapsychologist and psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor spoke of a ‘poltergeist psychosis’,39 which would later be studied in detail by John Palmer and William G. Roll.40 But Fodor also supported the idea of a kind of ‘poltergeist neurosis’, this time based on the model of hysterical conversion – that is to say, the movement of a fantasy to its concrete expression.41 Both result from ‘emotional stress’, a term that still holds some vagueness. Other easy metaphors support this idea: Iris Owen thought the poltergeist was a psychokinetic channel for the expression of suppressed excitement;42 Daniel Scott Rogo saw it as a projection of hostility or as displaced aggression.43